Letter To A Dyeing Child
by elfmaiden4legs
Summary: ****As requested by my readers Dr Watson writes back to the boy who wrote to tell him that his best friend Sherlock Holmes in fact faked his death. This is his responce!


**Letter To A Dyeing Child**

To Toby,

First of all I would like to apologise for not getting back to you sooner, and to let you know how grateful I was to receive your letter. As you can imagine my life has been somewhat chaotic and disorganised since my best friend – Mr Sherlock Holmes – for some reason saw fit to take his own life, and I can barely remember anything of any significance about the past few months. I have been living under a black cloud it seems – I miss Sherlock greatly, I haven't been back to the flat in all these long months – I haven't been able to face those now empty rooms where Sherlock and I once lived – Mrs Hudson has been kind enough to forward all of my mail to my new lodgings, but it has taken the words of a twelve year old boy to force me to realise that I have let him down. I have been too afraid to challenge the awful things that people who neither knew nor cared about Sherlock Holmes have been saying, for fear of what I might find, but I see now that he truly was a great man and the best of friends I could ever have hoped to have.

I am indeed deeply touched that you would take the time to write to me – and you have given me the hope and courage to carry on. Only someone who had taken the time to get to know the real Sherlock Holmes, not the man portrayed by the media, could know how his brilliant mind worked. Indeed he could be the most infuriating of individuals to live and work with at times – the mundane habits of day to day living carried no standing with him, but he could find fascination in the most seemingly inconsequential of things.

This is however how I know now that what you say you saw on the roof of Bart's Hospital that day is the truth – I have read and re-read every word of your letter in the weeks since I received it and I have come to the conclusion that only Sherlock could pull off a plan so incomplex in its theory and yet so elaborately executed – it does indeed have his signature written all over it.

I must confess that when I first received you letter I was dubious of its nature, which is why it has taken me a while to get back to you and say thank you – it seems that there are no end of people prepared to jump on the band waggon in the wake of a great mans – such as Sherlock Holmes' – death, but yours has been a voice of reason in a sea of lies and malign voices which could very easily drive a man to the very brink of human endurance.

I didn't get long to spend with Sherlock, but throughout the eighteen months that we spent living and working together he became a better friend than many I had already known for a lifetime, he changed me, he put the fire back into my belly when I had previously forgotten what living was all about – and I will always remember that time as being, without a single doubt in my mind, the best few months of my entire life, and for that I will be forever grateful to him.

I am sorry about your granddad, as a child I too was very close to mine growing up and he also died when I was about your age, but I am glad that you both got to enjoy the blog together whilst he was still alive. I haven't written anything since the day after Sherlock's death – I haven't been able to bring myself too – but as I say you have given me renewed hope.

Even so I doubt there will be any more stories – I don't know why Sherlock Holmes would see fit to fake his own death, but rest assured that if he's still alive out there I will find him.

One last thing Toby, don't take what the doctors say too much to heart, we are after all a pessimistic breed. One thing that living with Sherlock has taught me is that miracles do happen – so take your medication Toby, and don't take any foolish or unnecessary risks with your health just to prove a point, but never give up – carry on fighting until there is no strength left in you to fight anymore, and then take a deep breath and carry on pushing for the impossible – that is after all what Sherlock Holmes would do.

Just do that and you might just prove everybody wrong, as he himself has done many times before.

I'll be looking out for your name someday.

Warm regards,

Dr John Watson.


End file.
